the toes. Her feet were huge and her head was very small, as if someone were looking up at her from the ground.
Laurel had already glued down lumpy oval potato pearls to make the daisies’ petals, binding them with silver wire after they dried. The boots were the old-fashioned kind that buttoned up the sides, and the buttons on the front boot could be opened. Under the boot was a dark blue space deepened by plush velvet. Inside, Laurel had embroidered one of the eyes that served as her signature. The eye was looking toward one odd petal, too sleek and pointed for a freshwater pearl. It was a human tooth, an incisor.
When she’d first planned this quilt a year ago, she’d thought she would use one of Shelby’s baby teeth. She kept them all upstairs in the false bottom of her jewelry chest. That small space was reserved for relics and remembrances that she’d imagined as the starting place for quilts she’d never sewn: an amber doll’s eye, a broken plastic Christmas bulb, a mouse charm from an old bracelet.
But in the end, she couldn’t bring herself to give up even one of Shelby’s baby teeth for a quilt she planned to show and sell. They were too precious, these ivory mementos of Shelby at six, flashing a pink-gummed, gappy grin.
Laurel had put off the bride quilt, making others until she stumbled on a stash of teeth in an old bureau drawer at an estate sale. She didn’t think they were for sale, or even there on purpose, so she bought the ugliest bureau she’d ever laid eyes on to get the teeth secreted inside.
The bride was already quilted in patterns that seemed random on the front but made pictures and letters and more of her eyes that showed up perfectly on the hand-dyed cotton she’d used to back. The quilt was bound in yellowed satin cut from a musty old wedding gown, another estate-sale find.
She wanted to enter this piece in the Pacific International Quilt Festival at the end of the month. She’d won first prize in Innovative Quilts last year, but this year she was gunning for Best in Show. Or she had been. It seemed stupid now. The mouthless bride leaned forward, eager, like she might step at any second into some big adventure in her high-buttoned boots. Laurel couldn’t remember what had made her feel a connection to this piece in the first place.
The one picture Laurel had from her own wedding was a Polaroid taken by the clerk of the court. In it, David’s chin was set and his brows were down, like he was planning to grab Mount Everest with his bare hands and pull himself straight up it. His father had taken a long walk when David was five, and in the wedding picture, it was plain that David had already decided he would never be that guy. Laurel looked trembly and puffy-eyed, Shelby faintly pushing out the skirt of her best blue Sunday dress.
Her busy fingers made red rosebuds one after another, doing their regular job on the regular day she’d been told to have. She wanted to believe it was over, but she couldn’t catch her breath. The investigation might have ended, but it didn’t feel finished.
She ought to be relieved that the policewoman would not be back to prod at Shelby. Instead, she felt an odd, strong urge to call the police back in. To lie. To say she’d seen Stan Webelow for certain, not his possible hair. They would find out if the moving shadow she’d seen by the pool had been a ghost, a dream, or something real and worse. They’d make sure Shelby was hiding nothing more than a silly girl plan gone awry. Then she’d know Shelby was safe.
Shelby seemed so closed, so soaked in guilt, sheltering herself near Bet Clemmens as if Bet were a wall, asking Bet to back her up when Laurel knew damn well her daughter was lying. If Shelby had planned to meet Molly or even Stan, had failed Molly in some way, was somehow culpable . . . It wasn’t possible. Laurel would never believe it. But if Laurel could conceive it, consider it even for a second, Moreno could, too. Did Laurel really want to bring that woman’s cold, assessing gaze back to her daughter?
Mother had told her to let everything be normal. Go to the funeral. Say goodbye. Grieve. Move on. But her house did not feel